Hans Reiter (physician)

Hans Conrad Julius Reiter (26 February 1881 – 25 November 1969) was a German Nazi physician who conducted medical experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

[4] Later, after being transferred to the Balkans, where he served in the 1st Hungarian Army, he reported a German lieutenant with non-gonococcal urethritis, arthritis, and uveitis that developed two days after a diarrheal illness and had a protracted course with relapses over several months.

The combination of two of the elements, urethritis and arthritis, had been recognized in the 16th century, and the triad had first been reported by Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, an English surgeon who lived from 1783 to 1862.

[6][7] The error probably was influenced by his previous discovery of Leptospira icterohaemorrhagica, and by his work on Treponema pallidum that later enabled others to develop the "Reiter Complement Fixation Test" for syphilis.

In 1936, his meteoric rise continued when he was made director of the health department of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and received an honorary professorship in Berlin.

During his detention, he admitted to knowledge of involuntary sterilization, euthanasia, and the murder of mental hospital patients in his function as the gatherer of statistics and acting as "quality control" officer, and to helping design and implement an explicitly criminal undertaking at Buchenwald concentration camp, in which internees were inoculated with an experimental typhus vaccine, resulting in over 200 deaths.

[11] Reiter incorrectly concluded that the triad of conjunctivitis, urethritis, and non-gonococcal arthritis was the result of a spirochetal infection and proposed the name "Spirochaetosis arthrosis".